NetApp Expands AI Data Engine and Commvault Integration to Support Agentic AI
NetApp has introduced new capabilities designed to help enterprises deploy agentic artificial intelligence (AI) more securely by activating data where it resides, without creating additional copies. The updates expand metadata discovery through NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE) and deepen integration between the NetApp Platform and Commvault’s recovery orchestration workflows.
As AI agents increasingly move from experimentation into production, enterprises face challenges in making data available across fragmented environments while maintaining consistent governance and security. Traditional approaches often require data to be copied, moved and transformed before it can be used by AI systems, adding latency and cost while increasing compliance risks and the possibility of working with outdated information. NetApp’s latest updates aim to address these challenges through a zero-copy approach that allows organisations to discover, understand and activate existing data while retaining established access controls and protection measures.
“The agentic enterprise will be defined by how quickly and safely organizations can turn their data into intelligence,” said Asad Khan, Senior Vice President and General Manager, AI at NetApp. “For too long, AI initiatives have depended on complex pipelines that move data away from where it is created, governed, and protected. NetApp is taking a different approach: activating data in place with the governance, resiliency, and openness enterprises require. With AI Data Engine and our expanded work with Commvault, we are helping customers give agents trusted business context while strengthening the recovery foundation AI-driven operations depend on.”
Expanded data discovery and AI readiness
NetApp AI Data Engine, part of the AI Data Services layer within the NetApp Platform, helps organisations turn fragmented, unstructured enterprise data into assets suitable for analytics, assistants and AI agents. The latest update expands metadata discovery across NetApp ONTAP, StorageGRID and non-NetApp storage environments. It supports data discovery across NFS, SMB and S3 repositories, enabling enterprises to identify relevant information without first moving it to a separate repository.
The capabilities are designed to help organisations improve data visibility, identify security risks, optimise storage, accelerate migrations and determine which data is ready for AI applications. NetApp is also previewing further AIDE developments, including expanded AI-powered data understanding, deeper governance intelligence and open analytics integrations with platforms such as Starburst and Onehouse.AI. Upcoming agentic services are intended to help enterprises turn governed data into actionable context for AI systems at scale.
Commvault integration strengthens cyber recovery
NetApp has also expanded its joint solution with Commvault to help organisations protect and restore data supporting AI workloads. The integration connects ransomware protection signals from the NetApp Platform’s primary storage with Commvault’s recovery workflows. Features include near-real-time threat detection, deeper scans designed to identify evasive threats, cleanroom validation using advanced AI threat detection in an isolated environment, and clean recovery capabilities managed through the Commvault console.
The companies aim to help customers identify threats earlier and restore trusted data more quickly, reducing the risk of reinfection during recovery. “As AI-driven threats compress response times, organizations need a faster path to trusted recovery,” said Pranay Ahlawat, Chief Technology and AI Officer at Commvault. “By integrating NetApp’s ransomware detection and immutable data protection with Commvault’s clean recovery capabilities, we help customers accelerate response, restore trusted data with confidence, and reduce mean time to clean recover (MTCR).”
Building infrastructure for the agentic enterprise
The updates reflect a broader shift towards data infrastructure that supports AI applications without requiring organisations to build separate data-copy pipelines or adopt closed, single-vendor systems. By combining in-place data discovery and activation with governance and cyber resilience, NetApp aims to help enterprises prepare existing data for AI while retaining their current infrastructure choices. The approach also provides a foundation for more advanced capabilities, including semantic search, knowledge graphs, decision context and agentic data activation.
“Agentic AI raises the bar for enterprise data infrastructure, because agents need access to current, trusted, and governed data rather than another copy of yesterday’s dataset,” said Shari Lava, GVP of AI Research at IDC. “NetApp’s approach is a useful example of this shift: connecting data discovery, understanding, governance, activation, and cyber resilience at the storage layer, where much of the enterprise data estate already resides. Vendors that can do this well give customers a more pragmatic path to prepare data for AI, without the risk, cost, and complexity that often come with large-scale data movement.”
